Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- My hypothesis of why autocars will make life so much better than we're imagining, which I think a lot of negative/hater folks miss includes: (All of this is very USA centric because that's my context)
- Very old people who lose their license will get mobility back, as will blind or otherwise unlicenseable people
- Autocars can break phantom traffic jams
- They should massively reduce DUIs
- They will serve as a form of competition to airlines (and is approx as eco friendly with 2 occupants), especially for drives < 12hours. You can sleep or work while it drives. Probably also to long distance passenger trains, except when they're very fast like the 300km/hr one I took in Spain.
- Autocar can be a sort of public transit in that you will not need to own it, and it can serve many people per day. It's not likely to be mass transit though, afaik
- Autocar can make your commute be work time
- Autocar could make money while you dont use it, this is a form of "public" transportation that doesn't require massive public investment/loans. It will help decrease the net TCO of a car.
- Autocar can go home or serve others instead of needing parking garages in cities
- If it's safe to be in an autocar, very small cars can make sense again. It can help break the arms race of mass that has gone on in the USA. You dont need a big SUV to be safe from a bad driver if most cars are autocars and your autocar can dodge the bad manual drivers
- Autocar will drive fuel efficiently saving something like 20-25% of gas the vehicle would have used with an impatient human trying to save 1 minute on a 15 minute drive.
Many many more, but I hope this inspires some.
by maerF0x0 - I'll get on board with autonomous cars as soon as they stop centrally recording my whereabouts.by MrDrMcCoy
- Old people shouldn't be able to drive by default past certain age. It'd be better for everyone if they just got to use cabs for free.by dietr1ch
- Arguments I heard that make no sense to me:
- Autonomous cars will improve traffic because stopped cars can start going at the same time at an intersection -> Then you have no safety distance. And while theoretical improved reaction times mean you might need a bit less distance, the quadratic term comes from the needed breaking deceleration, not the reaction time.
- Autonomous cars will reduce congestion: they can't if they are supposed to drive around empty either to park somewhere else or to get to the next person to transport. On the contrary, they will increase congestion.
Note also that I don't buy the "work" inside "very small cars". It's not just that having to drive prevents you from working. Also the overall comfort while traveling isn't good enough outside of trains or planes for anything but some tiny amount of work.
I am on board with the benefits for old, disabled, tired and drunk people though. Also, I do accept that they will prevent a lot of accidents and deaths.
by stkdump - Of course. This seems so obvious.
More sensors with 360 degrees. Faster reaction time. Constantly improving, be it from real world data or from a simulated environment. Zero fatigue. No emotion evolved. No drugs are alcohol in the system.
Fyi. Long robotaxis.
- But they still cannot drive cars. All this stuff can do is react very slowly, maybe, if it detects it, to a change in the environment.
Self-driving cars will never be safer than human drivers.
If you believe otherwise, show actual proof of some kind. Show some footage of self-driving cars doing anything other than blundering around like an inexperienced and impaired driver.
- It could, but maybe not if your motto is, "Move Fast and Break Things."
Article is short on data instead referencing a bunch of aggregated IIHS studies.
- Waymo's mission is literally "to be the world's most trusted driver"
They put safety above all else and actually goal to it.
- That’s a Facebook motto but Facebook (now Meta) isn’t in AVs. I suppose that excludes Facebook of pre 2016 from participating in AVs? I think everyone is fine with that.by arjie
- "Move fast and break things" looks obviously bad for an autonomous vehicle ...by bestouff
- Which autonomous vehicle company has that as their motto?by anon84873628
- Uber exited the autonomous vehicle race several years ago. AFAICT, largely because of this mismatch. Who's still in this area (in a serious way) that behaves like that?by computomatic
- The article sensibly asks if the (intentionally or not) cherry-picked stats about automated driving (fair weather only, limited to specific areas that aren't especially difficult) is valid then cites a study that really massages those stats in a dubious way (e.g. only counts as a crash if the airbag triggered, no mention of weather). Hmmm...
Another thing I'd really like to know: let's suppose that these are indeed safer than the average driver. Is it also the case for the median driver?
- I have said for a while now that self driving cars do not need to be perfect. They will have accidents, of a different type than humans have, and sometimes they will be ones that most humans would avoid.
What they do need to be is better than humans overall, and then it would make sense for them to be allowed onto the road. When they get far safer than humans, phasing out of human driving will make sense.
They reached that point a while ago, now we just need legislation and public opinion to catch up.
by My_Name - They reached that point on very very limited scenario and conditions.by LtWorf
- Which people? The bottom 20th percentile? 50th? Where do you draw the line?
Wherever you draw it, there is a group of 10-100 million drivers who will be less safe (to themselves and others) in an automated vehicle.
There’s reason to believe that automated vehicles exceed bad drivers, and may improve , but it’s no guarantee that they will exceed very good or excellent drivers.
by tonymet - Yes but in practice the pushback is more about the shift on who is held responsible and who has the control to prevent a crash.
People understandably prefer to keep control of their own safety, even if on average they are worse at it. Because individuals that do care about safety can actually do many things to lower the risks well below the statistics, and likely remain much better than self-driving.
There’s also the question of responsibility and liability. In society we have such pressures so that there’s an incentive to continually reduce risks. It is dangerous to shift the responsibility to fast-growth tech companies that will care much less about individual accidents than the drivers involved, and are more capable of absorbing liability without substantive remediation.
Safety is outsourced in many contexts (aviation, police, military…), but it has to be substantially better than what the individual can achieve on their own. For instance, due to the expertise required, or because you can achieve more through coordinated collective action. And there has to be very high trust in the companies involved, the regulatory systems around them, and the technologies employed.
by oersted - ADAS + human driver seems enough to solve most of the shortcomings of both human and robot drivers.
Full self-driving doesn't strike me as necessary to prevent deaths.
by dlisboa - I recently implemented OpenPilot for my vehicle and used it on a 9 hour road trip.
Due to the nuances of my vehicle, the built-in hands-on-wheel nag was still active and required (small) driver wheel inputs every 10 seconds to prevent the beeps. Just keeping both hands on the wheel was enough to pacify the nag. But this forced me to keep attention on the vehicle, more than OpenPilot's face direction detector. Anecdotally I am certain this kept me more engaged than if I could have gone hands off.
The net effect was I had more capacity to be aware of what was going on around me on the road, AND I didn't feel nearly as fatigued at the end of the drive. Keeping the car between the lines consumes a little bit of cognitive energy constantly, which compounds over a long drive. Freeing up that load allowed me to pay more attention to what was happening on the rest of the road. And the mental burden was still half as much--I felt like I had driven maybe 4-5 hours instead of 9.
I have some ideas for how I might disable the built-in nag, but I'm pretty sure doing so would make my car less safe. The current configuration might already achieve the safety maximum for ADAS based on front-facing cameras only.
It increases situational awareness while reducing fatigue, and I think that anything further I try to do will adversely affect one or both of those effects.
by hoss1474489 - An ADAS would be L4 if it was designed to be truly autonomous. If it's not designed to be truly autonomous, you have to somehow address the attention problem. Even a good attention monitoring system isn't sufficient, because people have the ability to appear superficially attentive by all external metrics, while not engaging with the driving task mentally.
The data to differentiate these levels is pretty limited for a variety of reasons, and the problem only worsens when you conflate AEB with ADAS as the IHS/IEEE do in this article rather than use an OEDR-based definition.
- The problem with mostly-but-not-entirely autonomous is that humans will tend to treat it like entirely autonomous.by MostlyStable
- Automatic braking alone is a huge deal: if you're a bit late in braking, you get a warning. If you go past that, brakes auto apply. When configured correctly, I don't even notice it's there 99.9% of the time...and the times I do I'm glad it's there, because the beep pulls you out of a momentary distraction.
The only problem is not every car on the road has it yet.
by redwall_hp - There is a moral hazard with ADAS + human drivers:
> Once drivers move from the novelty phase to the post-novelty operational phase, behavioral adaptation may begin to occur and overreliance and over-trust in the automation features potentially develop, including a greater willingness to look away from the forward road (as shown in the VCC data set). [1]
I'm not sure if this is more dangerous than strictly human-operated vehicles, but I would wager that it is more dangerous than strictly autonomous vehicles.
1. https://aaafoundation.org/research/understanding-the-impact-...
by jpcfl - >> In March, Waymo’s independent study showed 92 percent fewer fatal or serious-injury crashes, a 13-fold reduction versus human drivers in comparable city environments.
I can't progress beyond this point in the article. How is Waymo's study "independent"? I don't understand.
- The study was done by one of the most respected and independent groups out there (insurance companies have a very high incentive to know what's real here). Waymo provided the data and probably helped pay for it.by hiddencost
- So can 100% public transport, non-autonomous. But there is less lobbying money for award winning journalists.by 32ahgf
- And trucking. But jobs.
- Hundreds of buses on the road. Amazing!by andreygrehov
- So your contention, then, is that Google>Waymo and the other companies should have invested billions not into AV, but instead into funding trains and paying for buses?by khazhoux
- That’s a really difficult problem to solve with the built environment being the way it is. Buses get the closest, but to make it usable at times other than rush hour, they have to run empty or nearly empty, which drives the cost very high (although this is often hidden by subsidies). The way to deal with low density transit is automation.by Robotbeat